Lazaro Vega: One of the things about coming into an area such as Grand Rapids that doesn't have its own free music community is the misconceptions people have about so-called free jazz that it's this formless blob, music that just sort of happens. Do you find that to be true?
Ken Vandermark: In small cities? Sometimes. But usually what happens when people come out to see this music, for instance, on this 10 day tour that I just got back from, the people that came to see those concerts were either people who were familiar with the kind of music already and had some kind of background in listening to it, or they were younger listeners who were more familiar with more experimental rock music that wanted to come out and hear stuff. Their ears are open to more extended types of sounds so they're not really put off by the fact that some of what we do is pretty aggressive and noisy at times.
But I find that more than 95% of people who come to the shows are able to deal with the music we're playing. Sometimes people might leave during a show or something like that because they're not able to get a handle on it. But I find that, at least in the cities I've played in, listeners now are a lot more open-minded and experienced with different kinds of music than people were even five years ago. I think there's been a real change in the awareness of listeners. I just played in 8 different cities all along the East Coast, then through Cleveland and Detroit. I was suprised how really consistent the audiences were.
Granted, they're selective groups. If people are coming out to see you play they're interested for some reason, either there was a write-up or they heard about it somewhere, so they're coming out with the intention of listening. If the group sat down in the middle of a mall and started playing that reaction might be a little bit different.
I've been impressed with the listeners in the last few years. I find that even if they don't know who Anthony Braxton or Ornette Coleman are, they really hear what's going on in some profound ways. They're able to make sense of the music and bring their own listening background to it. I've talked to people about it and they really seem to get a lot more of it than you would expect from people that maybe don't know that much about free jazz or the history of the music.
LV: I remember talking to Roscoe Mitchell about the importance of maintaining your own individual voice within this music. Jack McLean has said playing free jazz is like opening a bunch of different doors but always ending up in the same room. To counter that, sort of, I was speaking to Roscoe about it. He said, if somebody is following instead of playing their part, then you end up having problems. That suggests order by saying there's a part you're playing within this so-called "free" music. It's organized.
KV: Oh definitely. There's no question about it. Many of the principles that go into any kind of music, whether it's a string quartet by Beethoven or completely free improvised music by Evan Parker or Derek Bailey, the overall sonic experience someone may hear will be profoundly different, but the basic concepts of architecture that go into creating worthwhile music on real basic levels share many similarities: the concept of tension and release, the concept with the way melodic structures work. All those things apply. And you can't just go in and play whatever the hell you want and just go along and not focus on what your role is in a certain context.
One of the beautiful things about more open ended free jazz type improvisational music is the standard roles of, say, the drummer being part of the rhythm section and the saxophone player being kind of a lead instrument, all of those hierarchies have been thrown around, particularly after Ornette Coleman, his developments. In certain pieces the drummer will be in the forefront holding down the melodic sensibility. Or the bass player may take it. A sax player may be a backdrop to something else.
That's always happened. Going back to the beginning of the music when you listen to Louis Armstrong -- you've got these sections where everybody's improvising together. The jump between that and what Ornette Coleman was doing with his quartet really isn't as big as people really want to make it out to be.
LV: Actually, it's even simpler than that: what Ornette did is go all the way back to the blues guys who'd sing and it wouldn't be 12 bars of blues, they'd sing 7, 8, 9, or 3 bars, and the emotional content of the message would dictate song form. But when you get into collective improvisation that's a little more of a sophisticated urban expression at that time, especially when you're talking about the King Oliver or Fletcher Henderson band's shout chorus on "Sugar Foot Stomp." It's out, but everybody plays their part, and everybody's playing at the same time. But, yes, the drummer is in the rhythm section and Louis' trumpet or Rex Stewart's cornet is leading the way with everybody else doing something around that.
KV: I think those things apply to much of the music that's going on now, even though if you played it for someone, superficially the results would be very different, but the principles are really similar. If you don't apply those kind of principles to contemporary improvisation, you're going to have problems. There's bad free improvisation, just as there's bad straight ahead jazz. The failures in that kind of music -- people not listening to each other, people not knowing how to support each other, or play a certain kind of role within the context of the music -- that leads to failure in stuff that's completely open and free, too. It is a matter of learning the languages and vocabularies of the music you're trying to deal with.
So if I'm playing with Fred Anderson I feel like I'm trying to play who I am, but the context is very different than, let's say, the Vandermark 5, for example. I'm dealing with different kinds of vocabularies, different kinds of rhythmic sensibilities, different kinds of sound possibilities to be true to the context. If I just went into Fred's music and didn't try to examine what he was working with, it wouldn't work. It just wouldn't make sense for me to play the same way in that group as, say, I do in the NRG Ensemble. There are different demands.
LV: Could you get a little more specific about that in comparing and contrasting your inter-activity with Mars Williams and your inter-activity with Fred Anderson?
KV: Sure, sure. One of the biggest differences is the generational thing. That leads to a lot of musical differences. Fred Anderson's playing really comes out of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane and the developments they were making as players before Ornette. Ornette had a big impact on Fred, too, having not sat down with him specifically to discuss it, but [judging from] off-hand accounts he's made. But his music comes out of Sonny Rollins in a lot of ways, plus Coltrane's whole approach to soloing with very long, extended solos and developments and long form or extended solo structures that keep sustaining interest over a very long period of time.
When I'm playing with Fred, he takes say a 12 minute solo on one of his tunes, that's longer than some of the songs that I play in their entirety. So if I'm going to follow that with a solo, also on tenor saxophone, I've got to radically think about what I can do to fit into his kind of Ornette influenced sensibility with rhythms. The elasticity of rhythm on his heads, on one of Fred Anderson's themes, they're very singable melodies, but they have this quality of speeding up and slowing down the way he phrases his pitches. It's not like specific straight pulse, like dum-dum-dum-dum, you know, it has, like, dum-dumm dum-dum-dum dum-dee-da-dum-dum. There's a really beautiful rolling kind of quality.
I find with him I've got to take that into account. When I play with Mars Williams, we're much closer in terms of our background. We came up playing in jazz groups and working with rock music, funk groups, all of that spills over into our playing. Because of the similarities of our backgrounds, if Mars plays a certain kind of sound or he phrases in a certain rhythmic way, I can identify that right away. [Not] necessarily where the source is, but how to relate to it.
Whereas when Fred plays, I'm in territory I'm not as familiar with. And it's really challenging for me. That whole project, doing the record with him, and continuing to play with him now at the Velvet Lounge, it really pushes me to reconsider what it means to play the tenor saxophone. Because if he plays a great solo that last for 12 minutes and he plays all the tenor saxophone that you can on a tune, I follow that and it makes me radically rethink how I'm going to approach this.
Fred has a much more methodical sense of exposition. In most of the groups I play with there's a lot of radical shifting and changing. Almost on a constant basis. We're like really wired, coffee-drinking musicians.
LV: John Corbett calls it "insect music."
KV: He's referring to the English improvising innovations of Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, where it's very rapid shifting of texture, sound and pitch. That has a huge impact on what we're doing.
Again, with Fred, part of it is there's a different sense of searching going on. When Fred looks at something, he delves into it, explores it, develops it and re-examines it. His approach to doing that is a long look at something. Whereas I'm used to exploring by shifting, shifting, shifting, shifting, shifting, much more rapidly. It's the difference between holding up something to look at and slowly moving it around as opposed to spinning it as fast as possible to see what you get from it.
That's what's nice about working with Fred -- it forces me to slow down and try to re-examine the approach to improvising and say, Hey, there's a whole 'nother beautiful way of dealing with it. It's not just like listening to some records and say, Oh, maybe there's a reason they're doing it this way. I get to deal with it first hand.